Tenley E. Raj
Tenley E. Raj is an independent filmmaker based in Houston, Texas. A writer, director, and editor, she has worked as a one-woman production since 2023, shooting and cutting her own films across experimental, documentary, and narrative forms. Her work is semi-autobiographical, sitting at the intersection of documentary and fiction, and built on the conviction that the most specific stories are the most universal. Her films include Before the Freeze, After the Freeze (Best Feature, CinemaBriz; Official Selection, Love & Hope International Film Festival, Barcelona), and Proof of Life (Official Selection, IndieX Film Festival). She studied Philosophy at Princeton University.
8/18/20264 min read
How many years have you been making movies?
Three. I made my first film in 2023.
Why did you start making movies?
I studied philosophy, which trains you to argue a position. Film doesn't let you argue — it makes you show the thing and let people sit inside it. That felt closer to how I actually understand anything. I also started because I stopped waiting. I'd assumed I needed a crew, a budget, permission. Eventually it was clear that if I wanted to make something, I'd have to write it, shoot it, and cut it myself. That's still how I work — one person, one camera.
Tell us a little about your project. What will the audience be able to see in your film?
On Parenting and Travel is a confessional short. A mother sits in a beach house at the end of a two-week trip taken alone with her children, and talks directly to the camera about what that was. There's no script and no second person in the room. What the audience sees is a face, in one place, moving between exhaustion and something closer to awe — sometimes in the same sentence. It's about loving someone more than yourself and what that actually costs, hour by hour, when nobody's helping. The film is scored with a fragile neo-classical piano, and honestly the most important thing in it is the silence. The gaps. What she says is one film; what she almost can't say is the real one.
Why did you do this project?
Because that specific exhaustion doesn't have a public vocabulary. There's a version of motherhood that's allowed to be spoken about — tired but grateful, hard but worth it — and it's true, but it's the sanded-down version. The rest of it gets said to nobody. I was two weeks into being the only adult in the house, and I had a camera. It became the only thing in the room I could say it to.
One of the problems some directors encounter is directing actors, especially in the amateur world. How do you see this topic? What kind of work do you do with them?
In this film I'm the only person on camera, and I'm not an actor. So the whole problem inverts: the work isn't getting a performance, it's removing every opportunity to give one. Practically, that meant no script, no notes, no idea of what I was going to say. I shot at the end of a day when I was too tired to construct anything. I didn't review playback between takes, because the second you watch yourself you start editing yourself. And I didn't reshoot anything to make it better — a better version is a less true one. That principle scales to non-professional performers generally. The mistake directors make is trying to get an untrained person to act. You can't. What you can do is build a situation where the honest thing is also the easiest thing, then let it run long past where you'd normally cut. The usable material is almost always after they've forgotten to perform.
Of 100% of your time and money, what % did you dedicate to each department?
Because I write, shoot, and cut alone, these blur constantly. Roughly, by time:
Direction: 15%
Photography: 10%
Sound: 20%
Postproduction: 35%
Work with actors: 10%
Art direction / locations: 10%
Photography is low because it's one setup in one room — the framing decision took minutes and then never changed. Sound is high because the film is entirely a voice; if you can't hear a hesitation, the film doesn't work. Location was free, since it's the house we were already in. Money went almost entirely to sound, the score, and finishing.
If you could go back, what would you change about this project? (1 thing only)
I'd have filmed a second session on the first night of the trip, not just the last. Not to use both, necessarily — but the woman at the start of two weeks and the woman at the end are different people, and I only have one of them.
What are you happiest about this project?
That I left the pauses in. Everything in me wanted to cut around the moments where I stalled or couldn't finish a thought, and those turned out to be the film.
Make a wish to the movie gods. What do you ask?
More hours. Everything I've made was made in the margins of a day that was already full.
What movie would you have liked to direct?
The 400 Blows. Truffaut made something enormous out of a boy walking around a city, and it never once announces its own importance.
What kind of cinema do you like? Genre, directors, actors?
French New Wave, mostly — Truffaut and Varda especially. Anything where the line between documentary and fiction is being deliberately blurred, which is where all of my own work sits. And Wes Anderson, for reasons that look unrelated but aren't: the control is total, and underneath it the films are almost all about children and the adults who failed them. With performers I'm drawn to faces that don't do anything. Stillness over technique.
If all movies were going to be lost and you could save 3, what would they be?
The 400 Blows (Truffaut)
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson)
If you have more projects underway, can you give us a bit of information?
Two, plus one shooting. Read Receipts is a documentary about modern dating and loneliness — the specific kind that only exists now, when you know for certain someone has seen your message. The Gemstone is a feature screenplay I'm developing toward production. And I'm shooting an experimental documentary in West Texas this fall that's still too early to describe honestly.